Philly

I didn’t get to experience any my own recommendations last week, as I was pretty busy on my own with rehearsals and a gig. This week is more of the same, so I’m hoping you can attend some of this awesome stuff in my place.

The pickings are a little slim this week, but there is one main event that I strongly endorse…

Thursday 9/16Who: Your humble author’s harmony-packing duo, Arcati CrisisDetails:8pm @ Tin Angel, $10Why? This is our second headlining show at the Tin Angel, and we’re splitting it with our friend Dante Bucci, a hang drummer who must be seen or heard to be believed. Oh, and he leads us by millions of YouTube view. Yeah, I said millions.

Friday 9/17Who:Christie Lenee & Dani Mari bands, respectivelyDetails:9pm, Rox Box, $?Why? Christie Lenee is one of the best guitarists I’ve ever met – she can can from Ani staccato to Hendrix shred in a matter of seconds. Dani Mari is a super-friendly host of many local open mics, and her tunes are catchy – reminds me of Martha Wainwright sans the whining :)

Wednesday 9/8What: Askew indie rockWho:Dirty Projectors w/Owen PallettWhere:7:30pm, Trocadero, $15 adv / $17 dosWhy: I resisted Dirty Projectors when they appeared on best-of-year lists, but there is something undeniable about their lilting and sometimes atonal acoustic indie pop. This show is a steal, which you can definitely afford since you probably downloaded their CD from p2p.

Friday 9/10What: Dozens of Philly songwriters in one roomWho: Song ShuffleWhere: 7:30pm, World Cafe Live, $27 / $5 for students & under 25 Why: Want a crash course in Philly songwriters? See an almighty slew of them play one song each, which will likely yield some huge hits and unusual collaborations.

Saturday 9/11What: A pair of standout Philly female songwritersWho:Adrien Reju, Suzie Brown, and Barnaby BrightWhere: 8pm, Burlap & Bean in Newtown Square, $10 / $12 at door Why: If you insist on skipping our Collingswood gig, Adrien and Suzie are two of the most stunning songwriters Philly has to offer, not to mention adept performers and complete sweet-hearts. A bill with the both of them is not to be missed (unless you’re seeing us).

Saturday 9/11 & Sunday 9/12What: Crash course in glass pullingWho:Hudson Beach GlassWhere: 12-5pm by appointment, 26 South Strawberry St., 19106Why: Hudson is a pretty cool place to visit to begin with, but this weekend they’ll let you get hands on with the hot glass to pull your own glass flower (with the help of a trained glassblower).

Cris Valkyria, as shot by me at the Northstar Bar, earlier this summer.

Wednesday 9/1 What: Amazing local indie rock! Who:Post Post Where: 7:00pm, Rittenhouse Square Park, Free! Why:Filmstar split a bill with Post Post earlier this summer, and Post Post blew me away. Like a cross between Built to Spill & Thao w/the Get Down Stay Down. They will NOT be playing free shows in Philly for long, so get on it now!

Friday 9/3(I’ll Be There!)What: Gallery show, drinks, & mingling!Who: Britt Miller, my arty partner in FAMEWhere: 5-9pm, Drink Philly Office & Gallery, 239 Chestnut St., 2Flr. BWhy: Britt and I keep each other on the path to fame, and this is one of the many gallery shows that are on her road this year. Plus, free food and drinks. Be there!

Friday 9/3 – Monday 9/6 What: World premiere play! Who: Gina & Ocelot on a Leash Theater Company Where: 3/4 @ 8pm & 5/6 @2pm, The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut Street, $10 Why: My musical other half Gina Martinelli costars in Prudence, a play by one of my former directors Mary Ellen Cosaboon. I got a sneak preview of this last fall, and it’s a legitimately funny – not some freaky unintelligible Fringe-fest-thing.

Saturday, 9/4 What: Local CD release! Who:Boy Wonder When: 7:00pm, World Cafe Live, $10 Why: Boy Wonder is a crazy-amazing songwriter – every one of his tunes is immediately catchy with some wicked guitar interludes. Also, one of the nicest dudes I have met in the Philly music scene.

1. Philly (and the internet at large) got up in arms last week about a so-called “Philly Blogger Tax,” which was really just the city’s business privilege license being applied to Bloggers. My virtual friend JoeBeta sussed out a sensible explanation and critique of the policy, from Technically Philly co-founder Sean Blanda.

It’s certainly a horrible waste of resources to pursue blogs with revenue in the hundreds when some companies and individuals owe the city millions in back taxes, forcing the city to do things like offer a tax amnesty to the dead beats.

8. Amanda’s fiancé is super-famous comic, fiction, and film writer Neil Gaiman. Neil has been in a legal struggle with Todd McFarlane since 2002 regarding unpayed royalties on creator-owned characters he developed for McFarlane’s Spawn. Neil blogs part of the judge’s new decision, which contains delicious text like:

Much as defendant tries to distinguish the two knight Hellspawn, he never explains why, of all the universe of possible Hellspawn incarnations, he introduced two knights from the same century. Not only does this break the Hellspawn “rule” that Malebolgia never returns a Hellspawns to Earth more than once every 400 years (or possibly every 100 years, as suggested in Spawn, No. 9, exh. #1, at 4)…

I hope your Monday is going well. More news (and video) on my weekend as a Filmstar coming up!

Allow me to explain. Or, to begin to, as I’m sure this is a multiple-post-spanning story (just as that website feature was a multiple-month spanning obsession to research).

A few months ago Philly-local social media mover/shaker/sandwich-connoisseur @MikeyIl threw a series of events for the Ford #FiestaMovement. One of them was an all-local art show, featuring work by my partner-in-fame Britt Miller, as well as Eddidit and others.

Being Britt’s unpaid intern / personal assistant / life coach and a faithful supporter of friends and local artists, I got my ass there – even though the event was smack in the middle of negotiating the price of our house with our Realtor over the phone.

(Literally. Drunk friends: “What are you doing?” Me, to phone: “Hold on a second.” Me, to friends: “Oh, I just got another few thousand dollars knocked off the price of our house.” Drunk friends: “Wowwww.”)

It was a brief but tumultuous affair. Comic books combine my love of serial narrative with an OCD urge to make meticulous, alphabetical lists. They created a 10-year-old who would do anything to earn $40 a month to pick up every book bearing the image of Wonder Woman or an X-Man.

(Seriously, I’m surprised I wasn’t peddling coke for my neighbor. It’s a good thing my guitar habit didn’t get to drug-running levels of expense until after college, when I was salaried.)

For only collecting for four-and-a-half years, my comic collection is prodigious. Not only did I collect new issues weekly, but in the pre-spreadsheet days the adolescent OCD Godzilla in my soul – a mere tadpole, at the time – compiled lists of back issues by hand… lists twenty and thirty pages long, complete with estimated budgets and timelines for purchase. Every few months my father engaged my whim, and I checked off line after line.

I was hardcore. The guys at the comic store treated me like I was twice my age (now ironic) because I was so on top of my shit with my pull lists and my back issue pricing and my discussions of the Magneto’s morality and if the ends truly justified the means.

Then came the internet. AOL dial-up cost by the hour, and I was hooked on it within minutes of my first sign-in in January of 1996. Four months later my wallet issued an ultimatum: limit my internet usage, or jettison my comic addiction – now complicated by Marvel’s 90s’ decadence of holographic covers and limited series.

The real decider was probably a demo of Warcraft II, a living digital board of Risk I could play over and over again with my friends over my 14.4 baud modem.

No seismic activity. Relatively far away from potential tidal waves and protected from hurricanes. We’re not known for forest fires or mudslides, and despite our utter flatness occasional floods are minor. It doesn’t get too oppressively hot and the biggest challenge in our snow storms is waiting for the city to send plows. We’re relatively drought- and famine-proof, as modernized cities go, and NYC and DC are preferable targets for terrorists and rogue nuclear missiles.

Really, the closest we come to city-wide disaster is one of our sports teams winning a championship. Otherwise, short of OCD Godzilla bursting free from my chest to tramp around Center City, it’s a pretty safe place to live.

So, of course we move out of the center of the city to the fringes and within the first week there’s a tornado on our block.

Yes, day six as homeowners, tornado.

That is only vaguely an exaggeration. It wasn’t officially a tornado, and it was actually on pretty much every block adjacent to our new one while leaving us untouched.

I witnessed a portion of the storm from my office window, and it looked sufficiently deadly – I saw it blowing things clear off the gated roof of an adjacent building before my view was reduced to a foggy blackout. However, when I left, Center City looked no worse for the wear.

A huge tree on the next block, completely uprooted.

My new neighborhood was a different story. My bus stopped a mile short of our house in traffic snarled by dark traffic lights.

I disembarked and began a muggy hike back to my home. About a mile out from our house I started to see down tree branches. Then it was downed tree limbs, taking some power lines with them.

By the time I was a block away it was entire trees – trunk, roots, and all, upended ass over end to be splayed rudely across well-groomed lawns. Entire blocks of entire trees, the entire landscape denuded by mother nature.

To say I was nervous when I approached our house would be an understatement. I was obsessing over the huge tri-trunked tree that shades our patio, and how any of its trio of arms could go crashing through the roof to destroy my collection of guitars and recording equipment, now located in one conveniently destructible place.

My heart sank when I turned onto my street a block below our house, only to find it completely blocked off by the arboreal carnage.

A barricade of branches and power lines.

Having lived in the absence of disaster for nearly three decades, to me the sight was fantastical – as if my block had experienced some sort of wizarding dual, the debris glinting with hints of magic in the afternoon sun.

I navigated around it with great care, emerging on the other side to regard a pristine, untouched block stretching beyond the mess.

I raced the remaining distance to my house but, like the rest of our block, it was unmolested – no downed trees, no holes in our windows from golf-ball-sized hail. The only evidence of a storm my neighbor described as sounding “like a freight train passing by” was a dusting of shredded leaves on our lawn and our power, out.

We dodged a bullet – a house on the next block had its gutters shredded by downed trees, while a few streets over a massive branch decimated the windows of an SUV. A co-worker lost all of the power lines to his house to trees.

Us, we just lost our innocence – no longer protected from disaster by Philly’s impregnable grid of row homes, and now inclined to worry about the state of our house after every storm.

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